Offshoring is taking a completely new dimension. After technology and backoffice offshoring, it seems now it is the time to offshore the sales activity to India.

Speedera Networks, the US-based global provider of distributed hosting and content delivery services, has announced that it will house a part of its global sales activity in India. The company has hired 10 professionals in its Bangalore office to sell its services across the globe.

"We have been working on the model during the past nine months and we have been able to make headway with our sales team based out of India. The team has been closing deals on their own. This is eminently do-able and we are bullish on increasing its scope in India," Ajit Gupta, president and CEO of Speedera, said.

Claiming that offshoring of sales activity is a much more profitable proposition than offshoring technology jobs, Gupta said: "In addition to the cost savings, we find that Indian sales talent is much better than in any part of the globe. Thinking out of the box when pushed against the wall, is one of the key elements that Indian sales professionals are good at and this is the attitude we are looking for."

In addition to this sales activity from India, the company has also hired 10 people in the engineering unit in Bangalore.

Speedera's Indian office will serve more than just India as it will provide the full range of corporate functions to its global clients including service and tech support.

Noted Gupta: "India represents far more than a source of revenue for Speedera, however, as Speedera India will be as significant to us as our current US headquarters, helping to drive every facet of the business for the benefit of our customers worldwide."

The company has also announced that VSNL will be its new channel partner in India to sell its distributed computing network solutions.

"This solution addresses the full range of reliability, performance, scalability and security challenges across the entire lifecycle of a website. Our services provide virtually unlimited capacity on demand for any web property, allowing an organisation to optimise its web presence and enhance the quality of the website experience of end-users, while slashing the site infrastructure costs," said Gupta.v